Great in the Kingdom of Heaven

I've been accused of trampling on the memory of the dead, sacrilege and profaning the Holy Things.

It's a strange story. When we set up the Beaker Folk, we inherited - for want of a better word - some stuff from the Extremely Primitive Methodists of Eversholt, whose chapel had just closed. These included a Bible; the Sermons of John Wesley; a pulpit carved in the shape of a pulpit; and a brass plaque regretting the return of the Minister's son from the First World War. He was a right Romeo, by all accounts - went off to the Somme leaving behind seven broken hearts and came back to a similar number of toddlers.

We also inherited some ornamental brassware, which we use for ceremonial practises the Methodists would never have dreamed; a Sunday-school picture of Jesus as a blond, blue-eyed lad in a nightie surrounded by bunnies; some of those baize collection pockets (which we stuck on bamboo canes, and use in our Roller-Quidditch games in the summer; some Beryl crockery (natch) and an old Thermos flask, which they used to carry hot water from the Manse out to the chapel for baptisms. The Extremely Primitive Methodists were a very conservative sect, and rejected all modern conveniences in their worship, including hot water in the vestry. They were a pious bunch, always digging holes to serve as the church toilets.

Anyway, the Thermos flask sprang a leak last week, as old things do, so I threw it away. Stella's absolutely livid. But in my defence - how was I to know her grandmother donated that Thermos in memory of her own grandmother, in 1967?